Ahh how familiar winter in Alberta feels to me. Dry air, dry snow, generally little wind, and southerly sunshine. It’s similar to winter in Fairbanks but with many more hours of daylight. Personally I’d prefer to have less daylight; the sun is too bright on my sensitive eyes!

Our trip up here proved to go without incident, for the mostpart. We ended up with multiple nights of late drives for a few reasons.

1. Obviously a group of 13 field biologists, 9 canines, and 2 snowmachines will be up to no good and should be carefully scrutinized before being given entry into Canada. (the ~ 3 hour wait wasn’t actually all that bad)
2. Kamloops, British Columbia, has not 1, but 2 Super 8 Motels.
3. When you’re a  5 truck convoy trying to find a coffee shop in Revelstoke, B .C., it’s impossible to stay together. Even with walkie talkies, we probably lost a good hour just attempting to all gather in one spot to hit the road again!
4. After our delay in town, we ended up behind an accident on the highway. Eating cereal, pushing each other into the monstrous snow bank, walking from truck to truck, and playing different tunes on the radio helped pass the time as we sat for a couple of hours.
5. On Canadian highways in winter, apparently there’s no such thing as center dividing lines or road edge lines.  Driving slowly is the only safe way to go when driving through snow at night.

We reached our destination a day later than planned due to driving adventures in Edmonton. Our Snowmobile Training course carried on too late into the afternoon (because we had poor directions to reach the course in the first place and therefore had a late start), so we stayed in Edmonton for 2 nights rather than just 1.

As a random side result, we had delicious breakfast at Cora, a Canadian restaurant chain I’m familiar with thanks to past visits to this northern neighbor. Practically every dish comes with a variety of fresh fruit that’s peeled, cut, or sliced before being arranged like artwork. I know I haven’t considered this question seriously enough to give a 100% definite answer, but I think that if I had to eat at one restaurant for the rest of my life, it would be Cora. http://www.chezcora.com/home

Right after we got up to oil camp, which lies between Lac La Biche and Fort McMurray, our group sadly seemed to break into “the handlers” and “the orienteers.” Instead of housing all of us in trailers separate from the main part of camp, only the handlers and their dogs were set up there. We orienteers were taken to Dorm F, where we each were given our own room amongst the oil workers. True, only parking lot separates our group, but at first it felt strange to be so far apart.

For the first 10 days or so, handler/orienteer teams didn’t work together. While handlers set up training exercises and went looking for real field samples to train the dogs on to solidify that scat = ball concept, orienteers headed out on scouting missions. Since 95% of our roads are seasonal ice roads, they change a little from year to year. We were given rough maps from previous years, and it was our job to see which roads actually existed and were drivable. If we found roads that weren’t on the maps, we were to drive those and see where they went. In essence we became modern day explorers! … with trucks… and heat… and dataloggers to track our routes… and ready-made snacks… and more safety gear than you can really imagine. Still, I had a good time because it was my job to drive around corner after corner!

The downside to these roads is that they’re built on top of muskeg, which is boggy ground. The main roads are fine to drive on, but it’s hard to know for sure which roads are stable until we’ve heard that thunk and fallen through the muskeg. Just great! Generally if there are only short trees around, the terrain is flat, or we see grass coming up through the road, we probably shouldn’t be driving that road. Unfortunately those are just approximate clues; there is no key to recognizing soft muskeg.

Getting unstuck may include digging parts of the truck frame free, placing branches in front of or behind the tires for traction, calling for another truck to pull the stuck truck out, calling on the radio for any sort of assistance, and sitting pointlessly for hours. No one on our crew has had to spend a night out, but we do have the emergency kits to stay in the trucks overnight. Curling up on a truck seat in a down sleeping bag wouldn’t be that bad; I’ve done it before! 🙂

Once we had scouted most of the roads and the dogs seemed ready to work, the surveys began on January 10! Team Bengali was reunited once again; I had missed having a dog to hang out with in the woods! On day 1 Waylon found us 11 poops. Temperatures hovered around -9F, which is the coldest temp we’re allowed to work at – for the dogs’ sake, not ours. Most of my body was warm, but I remembered just how quickly fingers can get cold. Liner gloves + latex gloves sure don’t cut it for long when I’m collecting scat from the snow and entering data on a touchscreen phone!

Maybe this winter I’ll finally allow myself to use some handwarmers as an admission that I’m in fact not a machine with immediate finger rewarming capabilities… maybe. The other option is my usual finger rewarming method of “throwing” my entire arm like I would a baseball to force blood back into the fingers. Kicking an invisible soccer ball does the same trick in getting blood back to the toes. (Assuming I have all my fingers and toes at the end of the season, I’ll report how stubborn I was about not relying on warmers.)

Life has been as standard up here as you can ever expect for fieldwork, meaning plans change every day. Originally we were told we’d be working on a 2 days on – 1 off – 3 days on – 1 off schedule, but teams encounter different situations daily, and some dogs need healing time or more rest. We can’t predict when cold days will happen (cooler than -9F), so those impact our schedule, as well. The schedule really is more like a rough guideline than a norm. 😉
Waylon, Brandon, and I have been having a grand ol’ time up here. We don’t necessarily always find scat, which is unfortunate for Waylon because he doesn’t get his ball, but that’s the truth of reality. If we’re in bad habitat with few food sources, the wildlife probably won’t be using that area very much.

When monstrous machines are tearing down trees to make new roads, the wildlife probably won’t stick around. Even though most of the time we’re hiking in untouched snow with no sign of human presence, we’re not always walking in the woods up here.
 
Sometimes the truth hurts, doesn’t it Waylon?